henry lee lucas

I have to admit, watching Charlize Theron play Aileen Wuornos in the movie Monster made me feel a strange sympathy for the serial killer. I felt something similar after reading about Henry Lee Lucas too. Maybe it’s a teacher’s job hazard to always see the hurt, traumatized child in the adult, for, as Dr. Phil would say, I don’t ask why Wuornos and Lucas killed, I ask why wouldn’t they, given their formative years? Wuornos was convicted of killing seven men between 1988 and 1989 at point-blank range. She claimed self-defense: the men she killed either attempted to rape her or did rape her while she was working as a prostitute.

A few snippets from Wuornos’ early life:

Her mom was 14 when she married her dad, who was 16. They had a boy a year later, and then Aileen, a year after that.

Can you blame her, considering what her first fifteen years of life were like?

She was found sane, but over the course of the next year, became increasingly erratic in her behavior. She was executed in 2002. Her last words were “I would just like to say I’m sailing with the rock, and I’ll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus. June 6, like the movie. Big mothership and all, I’ll be back. I’ll be back.”

I’m no psychiatrist, but that would make me question her sanity.

Why is it that some people can be exposed to horrific early-life trauma and come out on the other side, but others, like Wuornos and Lucas, can not? Let me know your thoughts after you read up on Ed Gein,Henry Lee Lucas,Belle Gunness, and Robert Hansen.

Want more delivered to your inbox? Sign up here and get extras not available on my website!

Share this:

Like this:

Second in a series on serial killers! Did you miss number one on Ed Gein? Click here!

Henry Lee Lucas is often billed as the most prolific serial killer in the United States, but there is a reason he’s also known as the “Confession Killer.” Investigators have little doubt he killed, but they do doubt he was the prolific killer the media made him out to be. They also don’t doubt that Lucas contributed to that media frenzy.

Henry Lee Lucas killed for the first time at either 14 or 15 years old. His victim was a girl who fought back while he was trying to rape her–he says. For the next several years, he was in and out of prison on burglary charges. He then killed his own mother in an argument. Later, Lucas confessed to killing Becky Powell, a girl who had been his lover (allegedly consensual, but she was barely a teenager when they met). While people were still looking for Becky Powell, Lucas convinced another woman, Kate Rich, to help him search, and he killed her too. Both of the bodies were found with his help, so we know these two, coupled with his mother, are the three deaths we can attribute with certainty to Lucas.

However, to make things more difficult, Henry Lee Lucas hung out with, worked with, and lived with another killer, Ottis Toole (the uncle of Becky Powell). Whether or not they were in on these deeds together is unknown. Both confessed to numerous murders alone and together. (I’m not going to go into some of the things that Lucas did–just like with Ed Gein, if you really want to know, Google him, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

A television program interviewed Lucas years after he was imprisoned and retracted his confessions. He said that all of the media attention was “like being a movie star…they make you out that you’re the worst serial killer in the history of the United States, and that’s what I did.” Did Lucas confess simply for the attention and adoration (yes, adoration) he received?

Potentially.

The nature versus nurture argument is never more significant than when discussing mentally disturbed and traumatized individuals, and Henry Lee Lucas is a stellar example. He grew up with an alcoholic father who couldn’t work and made moonshine instead. They lived in a one room cabin with no heat and no running water. His mother, also an alcoholic, prostituted herself and made a young Henry watch, and at least one older sibling forced him into an incestuous relationship. His mother also made him dress up as a girl and send him to school with his hair curled.

But that was just the beginning.

While Lucas had to endure abuse from his father, his mother was much, much worse. He was beaten so badly on the head that he was comatose for three days. He also had an injured eye that went untreated. It became infected and had to be removed. His mother shot and killed a mule that an uncle gave to Lucas, and, once, when he accepted a teddy bear from a teacher at school, he was beaten for it upon his return home. All of this while Lucas was still in grade school.

That fight he got in with his mother before he killed her? It was because she was demanding he return home (as an adult) to care for her in her old age.

Given what kind of life he had as a child, I’m not surprised at all he became a killer, but he did recognize he had an issue. In fact, he even said this: “I have tried to get help for so long and no one will believe me. I have killed for the past ten years and no one will believe me. I cannot go on doing this. I also killed the only girl I ever loved.”

To suffer the physical, mental, and sexual abuse he did as a young child, well, that’s going to impact brain development. But why would he confess to crimes he didn’t commit? For once in his life, he was getting attention. Attention that didn’t hurt him physically or sexually. Attention that came while he was in a warm environment with adequate clothing, food, and water. Attention that meant he could travel from state to state with police to show him where he may have disposed of bodies, eating cheeseburgers and drinking milkshakes along the way. In short, Henry Lee Lucas’ life in prison was a thousand times better than it was on the outside.